Ecce Sigum

Immanentize the Empathy

Horresco Referens

John Winkelman

Bookstore days:

customer: Do you have any books on bookshelves?
me: All of our books are on bookshelves.

A month and a half out from Christmas and we are well over halfway in to the obvious holiday marketing season. This is the third year since I graduated from college that I hold a job that is not particularly affected by the Christmas season; before programming, there were books and food.

With Cascading Style Sheet technology finally entering the mainstream the various popular/retail websites can update their look in an hour, where before a massive changeover of .gifs and FONT tags would take days – if the company in question could even be bothered to make the effort. Red, white and green are the same colors you will see if you are looking at a dead fish floating in algae.

This morning it occurred to me that with my last post I have increased the likelihood that people researching the photometric properties of Silly Putty will end up at es.o. Let us tip the scales some more: Silly Putty Silly Putty Silly Putty Silly Putty Silly Putty Silly Putty Silly Putty Silly Putty Silly Putty Silly Putty.

Don’t sue me. I’m funny.

Adversaria

John Winkelman

Given an even number n greater than zero. For each time ( d ) the result of the division of n by 2 returns an even number, it may be determined that n is a multiple of 2 raised to the power of d. Thus, say, 10 is a multiple of 2 (5) but not 4. Twenty is a multiple of 2 (10), 4 (5), but not eight. 80 is a multiple of 2 (40), 4 (20), 8 (10), and 16 (5), but not 32. And so on, ad infinitum.

I have no idea why this occurred to me today in the middle of a meeting, but it is covered by a draconian NDA, and all of you can expect to hear from my lawyers by the end of the week.

In other news, here is a list of the search strings which have led various people to es.org:

john winkelman (you rang?)
visual migraine (swirly. painful.)
mystery of time and space (look around you)
mystery of time and space game (I said look around you)
the mystery of time and space (you just aren’t listening)
0d point 1d line 2d plane 3d 4d time (3d VOLUME!!!!)
bad character innerhtml (not on MY site, monkeyboy)
how does silly putty absorb light (huh?)
karma and metaphor (dogma and semaphor)
mnemonic matteo ricci (pneumatic christina ricci)
pictures of the town of springport (more of a village, actually)
thinking about you (awww…*melts*)

Genius Loci

John Winkelman

“Moving water is forever in the present tense.”
– Jim Harrison, Off to the Side

“The first Ch’in Divine August One
learned, to his satisfaction and to his dismay,
that he had conquered every civilized land;
for he believed that beyond the borders of his empire
nothing existed but howling winds and barren waste.
At this same time Alexander
had overrun the Western World. So it was
that two men not knowing of the existence of each other
shared a common delusion.”
-Evan S. Connell, Notes From a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel

ESTRAGON: A relaxation.
VLADIMIR: A recreation.
ESTRAGON: A relaxation.
VLADIMIR: Try.
ESTRAGON: You’ll help me?
VLADIMIR: I will of course.
ESTRAGON: We don’t manage too badly, eh Didi, between the two of us?
VLADIMIR: Yes yes. Come on, we’ll try the left first.
ESTRAGON: We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist?
-Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

Diem Perdidi

John Winkelman

I don’t know about you, but I find some amusement in the fact that Guy Fawkes Day fell on Election Day this year. Irony? We will know tomorrow.

Remember, remember the fifth of November
Gunpowder, treason and plot.
I see no reason why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.

Work on Project Gutenberg is going slowly, as I have realized that, in trying to maintain the exact structure of the original eText documents, I am making the XML files much less useful than they could and should be. So the concern becomes: Is the exact replication of the original eText within XML as important as the exact replication of the original hard copy within eText format? Ultimately I would have to say no, as XML markup alters the document drastically anyway. As long as the actual text is unchanged, and the whole of the eText is contained within the XML, any markup structure may be used.

There is this thing going on called National Novel Writing Month wherein the participants try to write a (hopefully coherent) 50,000 word novel, starting at 12:01 am November 1 and ending at midnight November 30. A friend of mine is participating in the event (link goes to the work-in-progress). I was tempted to join the cause, but I am too busy catching up on all of the classic arcade games, redone here in Java .

Ignis Fatuus

John Winkelman

After numerous false starts the computer is finally up and running. I was without a steady home PC for over a month, and in that time I rediscovered things I had forgotten about. Like girls. And books. And friends.

The rudiments of the first Project Gutenberg, uh, project are up at the PG subdomain . The first and only completely marked up text is Tartuffe.

A surprising number of the available PG texts are Russian in origin; Dostoevsky, Gogol, Chekhov, et.al. Probably because the type of person who would spend several weeks typing an eight hundred page novel into a text editor is the type of person who would get a kick out of reading that novel in its original language. I am not that hard-core, but I do like to get into the spirit of things, so this evening while I was on the phone with a beautiful woman I cooked up a big mess o’ borscht. My recipe is as follows, in descending order of volume of ingredients: water, beets, potatoes, onion, celery, carrot, salt, Tabasco. The precise proportions don’t really matter. In this borscht is a lot like gumbo. As long as you have beets, pretty much everything else is done to taste. The Tabasco is in place of the more traditional vinegar, and it compliments the deep red of the soup nicely.

For those of you who think I am now a communist or something, let me assure you that the only Marx I follow has a New York accent.

On a less irreverent note, I added a new photo page, currently linked in at the bottom of the navigation. All pics were taken with an Olympus D-550 set to take low-light pictures. Slow shutter speeds and fast motion blurs.

Back In 10 Minutes

John Winkelman

The new computer is up and running, and I am ironing out the last few bugs. Things are more complicated than they really need to be.

Since I am quite busy and don’t want my *checks stats page* six readers to be bored, here are a couple of pages full of stuff to read:

http://www.textism.com – the weblog of an expatriate Canadian now living in French wine country. Although I probably would not enjoy his company for long he does write a wonderful web-log.

http://www.mcsweeneys.net – the official site for Timothy McSweeney’s magazine. All of the writing in here is humorous, quirky, and very good. In particular check out the lists page , which can cause a work slowdown of unprecedented proportions.

I also put up the abstract-in-progress of my work on the Project Gutenberg stuff, and I will have a project subdomain up by the end of the week. I have a feeling this project will eventually be huge.

The Genius of Marketing

John Winkelman

Items offered to me, at a Substantial Discount, in my Amazon.com Gold Box:

An Iron
A Digimon Action Figure
Baby Jockey Light Blue Boxer Short Set
Collector’s Edition Anodized 11-inch Griddle w/ Non-Stick Finish
LabTech Computer Speakers
Cordless Phone with Call Waiting, Ivory
Amelie on DVD
5 1/2 – quart Round French Oven, Blue
3 – quart Cast-Iron Indoor – Outdoor Cooker Combo
Baby Sweet Jacket, Pant, and Hat set

Possible conclusions drawn about myself, based on contents of preceding list:

I have children.
I watch French movies.
I cook.
I will play with something labeled “action figure” when it is clearly a “doll”.
I require call waiting.
I own a computer.
I construct pancakes with a radius less than 5.5 inches.
I require multiple hardware options when making a Grilled Cheese Sandwich.
I collect aluminum cookware.
I cook French children.
I am susceptible to impulse purchases.

Some of these conclusion would be accurate. I’m not telling you which ones.

My Eyes Are Bleeding

John Winkelman

Started and finished marking up Tartuffe over the weekend. Took me about five hours. In prose the structure of the individual line is important so every single line had to have a start tag and an end tag. Translation: chapped eyes. An 800k document took me two hours, and a 120k (pre-markup) document took me five.

Here are links to Tartuffe and The Club of Queer Trades . Also, here is the XML Schema I am working on for Project Gutenberg.

I am also working on an abstract/explanation/tutorial on marking up PG texts in XML based on the afore-mentioned Schema. This will be insanely dull and opaque and of interest only to the kind of people who are willing to spend hours at a time converting an electronic version of a hundred-year-old book into a different electronic version of a hundred-year-old book.

And thus do I pass my time as I wait for the world to end.

Dead Souls

John Winkelman

I recently finished marking up Nikolai Gogols Dead Souls . For those of you who suddenly think I am a Satanist or something, the explanation is as follows: Nikolai Gogol , a Russian writer who lived in the early part of the nineteenth century, wrote a book called Dead Souls . Project Gutenberg has made available a plain-text version of the book, and I have taken that plain text and marked it up as XML, in the hope that one of these days I will have a formatted, readable, printable version up on ES.O.

Marking up Chesterton’s The Club of Queer Trades took about an hour. This one took about two. At this rate, a book a week is not only possible, but easy, relaxing and rewarding; and it makes me wonder why the HTML Writers Guild has done nothing since early 2000.

Since my inquiries have generated no replies from the folks at the HTML Writer’s Guild I must assume I am on my own on this project. When I get the new computer up and running I will slap together a couple of stylesheets for the marked-up texts, and perhaps bundle them off to the people who run Project Gutenberg.

In the meantime, make yourself a rock band .

Soon, Very Soon

John Winkelman

Just got word that the new computer is on its way. Should be here next week. Intel p4 2.53GHz; 100gig hard drive; 512mB of high-speed RAM; 40x12x48 CDR/W drive; screaming case with a power supply which can be used to jump-start a car.

And I will use it to check my email. But I will check my email faster and better than anyone else on the planet.